natalie kucken

I kept making personal deadlines dictating my moods, "you're only allowed to feel this way until Wednesday" "by the 26th stop acting the way that you have been". Everything was happening again, I spent most evenings thinking about bank transfer times and craigslist emails and missing money and dividing numbers. My shoes match the cracked grey-white pedestrian crossing lines on the streets in manhattan. Snow covered the seats on top of the open tourist busses. I kept thinking about how my friend graffitied "I mostly think about killing myself and sex" really huge in my old stairwell and how I changed it to "I mostly think about myself and my ex". I arrived in soho every morning at the same time and kept track of how the sunlight fell between the tall buildings, the sunny spots on the street changed day to day very slightly and I kept having to change the place I would stand to make sure to be all of the way in the light. I fell down a flight of stairs without noticing I was falling on valentines day and woke up in a snowy dorm at 4pm the next day, threw up when I got home and laid on my floor. My roommates put all of my broken mirror pieces in a tote bag and I threw away almost all of my books. I organized all of my possessions into white vanilla-scented trash bags again.